If you’re looking for a list of the best of ads of Super Bowl 2025, this isn’t it. You can find plenty of those on the internet already. Nope, I’ve decided to look at this year’s ads through a very specific lens. A stupid one.
This year’s Super Bowl seemed to have more stupid ads than ever. It’s like marketers had seen the swing back to humour last year and said: “let’s out-wacky them”. Now, I’m not sure this is a guaranteed way to get the greatest ads. In fact, it probably risks marketers forgetting to say something meaningful or memorable about their brand at all.
Perhaps, now that Super Bowl advertising is as competitive as the actual football, the ads are simply trying too hard to stand out by being the most absurd or weird. A risky thing to do without a having a decent idea at the heart of it.
Of course, not all the ads took the stupid path this year, but oh so many did. And although many fell short and left me somehow disappointed at the missed opportunity, many brands successfully used stupid to entertain.
Rating by snorts
Here’s 10 of the more successfully stupid ads that I’ve rated out of five snorts, because that seems like a stupid thing to do:
Mountain Dew: I reckon this could easily have been an idea sitting in a bottom drawer. ‘Imagine turning singer, Seal into an actual singing seal.’
This became a slightly disturbing image that once you see it, you’ll never unsee it, ever. It was a pretty stupid idea that could have been used by any brand willing to be this weird, as long as Seal was stupid enough to agree. Thankfully for Mountain Dew, he was. I give it four snorts and one little fart.
Squarespace: Set in Ireland in an uncertain decade, we see a philosophising newspaper delivery boy riding a donkey through a country village. But rather than throwing newspapers he’s throwing laptops for people to create websites for themselves. And he’s doing a wee bit of damage as he goes about it, flying laptops aren’t exactly light. Beautifully crafted stupidity. Four and a half snorts.
Pringles: The logo on the side of a pack of Pringles features a large moustache. So, a creative somewhere says, “I know, let’s have a dude who finds the Pringles empty, holler for help, and in response the moustaches of some famously moustached personalities tear away from their faces and fly like moths to gather packs of Pringles to rescue the situation. Hey, and let’s set it to a reworked Batman soundtrack.” Boom! Stupid – nailed. Three loud snorts.
Little Caesars: Maybe flying facial hair is too obvious a stupid route? Because Little Caesars did it too. In their ad, actor Eugene Levy’s well-known bushy eyebrows fly off in spontaneous reaction to him eating Crazy Puffs (whatever they are). This scenario could only be more stupid if a bunch of hairy caterpillars were to think his eyebrows were some kind of God to worship. And they do. Three and a half snorts.
Uber Eats: Often trying to make a connection between your brand and the event you’re sponsoring is a good thing to do. So, when you recognise Super Bowl sounds a lot like a dish of food and then find lots of other random and tenuous food related words within football, why not make Matthew McConaughey a conspiracy freak hell-bent on proving that the Super Bowl is just a way to get Americans buying food. Yep, that sounds stupid enough. Let’s go with that. Four and a half snorts.
Stella Artois. What could be better than having David Beckham in your Super Bowl ad? Having two David Beckhams in your Super Bowl ad of course. And a really stupid way to do that would be to get Matt Damon to play David Beckham’s twin, called David Beckham. Could we afford such stupidity? This is Super Bowl, of course we can. Three snorts.
Homes.com: No one who creates advertising is stupid enough to think you can claim a brand is the best without any kind of legal substantiation. So, while we may not be legally able to say: “homes.com is the best”, we can legally say: “we can’t say homes.com is the best”. A wonderful example of how being stupid is sometimes a clever way to side-step some stupid in-the-way advertising rule. Three and half snorts.
Coors Light: Speaking of advertising rules, I’m not sure that here in NZ we could rebrand a case of beer as a Case of the Mondays, and suggest it as an anecdote for the worst Monday of all, the one after Super Bowl. But that what Coors Light did.
They introduced it with a typo in a high-profile national print ad. Then they created a face roller for rolling a cold can of Coors over your puffy Monday face. And they made a failed attempt at making an ad for a Case of the Mondays featuring an actor suffering from a case of the Mondays. And during the game, they finally released a big 60 second ad featuring sloths representing people with some bad cases of the Mondays. This was a lot of stupid, piled on stupid. Four snorts.
Hellsmanns Mayonnaise: I’m not sure if working on a mayonnaise brief gave rise (pun intended) to the stupid idea of a sexual climax being the answer. But whatever, they remade one of the most famous movie scenes of all time, from When Harry Met Sally.
This time though, Meg Ryan’s moans of delight are brought on by the mayo she squeezed over her sandwich. Yep, that’s pretty stupid. Two and a half snorts.
Liquid Death: When you can’t think of what to say, sing it. This could be very stupid advice in the wrong hands. But when your brand is based on many seemingly stupid ideas, like being a water called Liquid Death for instance, then you might be ok with this approach. Singing about the merits of drinking on the job wouldn’t be as twisted if it weren’t for the fact that Liquid Death cans stupidly look like beer. Three snorts.
Reese’s:The ad for Reese’s Chocolate Lava Big Cups is a classic example of simply leaning into the product. But doing it in a fantastically stupid way. This spot shows confused Americans trying desperately to eat actual lava. Stuff that happens in the US rarely surprises us anymore, but in terms of stupid, you could say, this takes the cake. Four snorts.
Quantity, not quality, stupidity
Yeah, okay, that was 11 ads. (I’m not stupid.) And none of them got a full five snorts from me. A couple certainly would have done last year. So maybe it wasn’t the greatest year ever for quality stupidity, but that was made up for in quantity. Of course, there were a few ads that I really liked that were not stupid enough to make a stupid list: Nike, NFL, Jeep and Pfizer, to name four.
However, putting Super Bowl and snorts aside, when it’s appropriate for a brand, there’ll always be a case for using stupidity in advertising. And on those delightful occasions, we’d be stupid not to try.
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